A Bibliography and Short Biographical Sketch of William Healey Dall
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SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOLUME 104, NUMBER 15 A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF WILLIAM HEALEY DALL (With One Platk) BY PAUL BARTSGH HARALD ALFRED REHDER AND BtULAH E. SHIELDS U. S. National Museum (Publication 3810) CITY OF WASHINGTON PUBLISHED BY THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION JANUARY 30, 1946 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOLUME 104, NUMBER 15 A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF WILLIAM HEALEY DALL (With One Plate) BY PAUL BARTSCH HARALD ALFRED REHDER AND BEULAH E. SHIELDS U. S. National Museum (Publication 3810) CITY OF WASHINGTON PUBLISHED BY THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION JANUARY 30, 1946 Z%t £oro (gafttmore (pr«es BALTIMORE, MD., D. 8. A. William Healey Dall, 1845-1927 A BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF WILLIAM HEALEY DALL ' By PAUL BARTSCH, HARALD ALFRED REHDER, and BEULAH E. SHIELDS United States National Museum (With One Plate) BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF WILLIAM HEALEY DALL August 21, 1845-March 27, 1927 By Paul Bartsch The only lesson which may be said to be absolutely clear is, that naturalists are born, and not made ; that the sacred fire cannot be extinguished by poverty nor lighted from a college taper. That the men whose work is now classical, and whose devotion it is our privilege to honor, owed less to education in any sense than they did to self-denial, steadfastness, energy, a passion for seeking out the truth, and an innate love of nature. These are the qualities which enabled them to gather fruit of the tree of knowledge. (Dall, "Some American Conchologists," Proc. Biol. Soc. Washington, vol. 4, pp. 95-134, 1888.) William Healey Dall, one of America's foremost malacologists, traces his American ancestry to a William Dall, who sometime be- tween 1740 and 1745 came to America from Scotland and established a "colonial store," much like our modern department stores, in Baltimore, Md. This venture was evidently a success, for a branch in charge of a son or sons was shortly after established in Boston, Mass. The direct line of the American ancestry of Dr. Dall is best repre- sented in the following tabulation : William Dall William Dall, 1716-1803, and Eliza Bradford William Dall, 1753-1819, and Mary Parker James Dall, 1781-1863, and Henrietta Austin Rev. Charles Henry Appleton Dall, 1816-1886, and Caroline Wells Healey William Healey Dall, 1845-1927 1 Published in large part from fund contributed by The American Malaco- logical Union. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 104, No. 15 1 2 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. IO4 Perusing the achievements of the direct and collateral lines of the Dalls, I am agreed with the Doctor's son Whitney that "as young men the Dalls all had a spirit of adventure if not recklessness and had rather more than ordinary vision in their enterprises. Sometimes they did not work out well as in the case of the reclaimed land on Boston neck, but by and large they were a sturdy lot." Dr. Dall's father was a saintly character who naturally was drawn to the ministry. He was educated in Boston, graduated from Harvard College in 1837 and the Harvard Divinity School in 1840, and was ordained evangelist in 1841. Immediately thereafter he was minister at large in St. Louis, where he conducted a school for poor boys and girls. From there he was transferred to Baltimore, where he carried on a similar service under Unitarian auspices. On September 24, 1844, he married Caroline Wells Healey, a teacher in Miss English's Female Seminary in Georgetown, D. C, a fine and well-known school attended by the daughters of prominent Washingtonians. Madam Dall, as she later became known, was a scholarly woman, strictly puritanical and frankly outspoken, whose critical and incisive remarks, verbal as well as written, were rather dreaded by the less stable members of Washington society. In 1845 ^le Dalls returned to Boston, and in that city William H. Dall was born on August 21. Shifting positions carried the family to Portsmouth, N. H., Needham, Mass., Toronto, Canada, and finally on February 22, 1855, the Reverend Mr. Dall was appointed by the American Unitarian Association as its missionary to India. There he started the first missionary school for the young in Calcutta, where, with the exception of a few short visits home, he labored very success- fully, until his death in 1886. It was not practical for his young family to accompany him, and the family was therefore established in a cot- tage in West Newton. The financial resources of the family were limited and required the strictest economy, and welcome were the increments earned by Mrs. Dall by writing and teaching. At West Newton young Dall attended, as day scholar, the local school of the Allen Brothers which had a deservedly high reputation. Later the family returned to Boston, and Dall's educational endeavors were continued at the Brimmer School and later at the English High School, where he obtained some knowledge of Latin, French, and trigonometry, the last of which he said was very useful to him later in his Coast and Geodetic Survey work. In 1862 his father, while on a visit, took him to Cambridge to meet some of the professors, an event which, says Dall, was "a privilege : NO. 15 WILLIAM HEALEY DALL BARTSCH ET AL. 3 for a boy to remember." Here he later became a pupil of Louis Agassiz at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, having Putnam. Verrill, Scudder, J. A. Allen, C. F. Hartt, and H. Hagen as teachers and associates. His father, on this visit, urged him to come to India and enter the tea business, which he eventually definitely declined. While this subject was under discussion, Louis Agassiz and his asso- ciates, realizing the value of an enthusiastic young man in a field from which little of scientific value had come to the United States, gave young Dall an intensive course in collecting not only in Mollusca but in other branches of natural history, which widened his interest and enabled him to add to the sum of knowledge in subjects other than his chosen specialty. It was at the end of his high school days in 1863 that Dall enlisted as a volunteer for a short time for the protection of the arsenal at Boston. "At this time," says Dall in his journal, "a book fell in my hands which determined my line of study permanently. I had for some time collected natural history objects, insects, etc., and sent them to Prof. Agassiz and even to the Smithsonian, but without a special interest in any particular group." The book referred to was Dr. A. A. Gould's Report on the Invertebrata of Massachusetts, almost entirely devoted to the Mollusca and beautifully illustrated by the distinguished author. He continues I became interested in collecting the land and fresh water shells of the vicinity and when I became puzzled about some of them I called on the good Doctor for information. He was kindness itself and gave me encouragement to pursue my investigations as well as some of his published papers. I soon found myself studying the subject, borrowing conchological books from the library, and extending my collecting field to the seashore between Boston and Cape Ann, as my spare time allowed. Since then the population of the coast waters has exterminated most of the more sensitive species which at that time were not rare. Doctor Gould without my knowledge, presented my name to the council of the Boston Society of Natural History and I was admitted as a student member excused from fees. I made the acquaintance of others interested in natural history, and so was launched into the serious study of the Mollusca, which has been the major part of my life work. On graduation from the high school he engaged for a time as office boy with Deshon and Yarrington, African traders, on India wharf. Leaving them, he spent some time working over shells at the Boston Society of Natural History and collecting in the woods about Boston and West Lynn as well as in the marshes of Nahant. It was at this point of unattachment that a visitor from Chicago, the Rev. Robert Collyer, suggested the possibility of finding suitable employment in 4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. IO4 that city. We therefore shortly after find Dall occupying a clerkship in the Land Office of the Illinois Central Railway at a salary of $27.50 a month. While there, he spent his spare time at the Academy of Science Museum, working on their collections and making the ac- quaintance of Kennicott, Nason, Bannister, and other members of the small scientific circle then existing in Chicago. He was next attached to an exploring party searching for iron de- posits in northern Michigan at about double his former pay. On his return to Chicago he found the projected expedition under Kennicott to Russian America under discussion at the Academy, and he was asked to join this enterprise at a salary of $50.00 a month. A tempt- ing offer of $2,000 a year was made to him at this time to manage a lead mine in Missouri which he declined, preferring the scientific work offered. To prepare himself for the Alaskan enterprise of the Russian- American Telegraph Co., he left Chicago on March 5, 1865, for Washington, to gain additional training at the Smithsonian Institution, where he fell under the genial guiding influence of Spencer Fullerton 2 Baird whose historic biography he was later destined to prepare. Here he made his first contact with that group of young scientists chosen to carry out the Smithsonian ideal, "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." The party sailed from New York on the Golden Rule March 21, 1865.